THE TRUE AND INIMITABLE KINGS OF LAUGHTER
CLOWNS are the most traditional of all entertainers and one of the most persistent of the traditions about them is that those who have just died were better than those one has laughed at a moment ago. A very obvious reason is that the clowns of the recent past are the clowns of our own childhood. It is my fortunate position never to have seen a clown when I was a child, and all those I have ever laughed at are alive and funny. One of them, the superb Grock, was a failure in New York; the remarkable Fortunello and Cirillino who arrived with the Greenwich Village Follies of 1922 are acrobats of an exceptional delicacy and humour; there isn’t a touch of obvious refinement about them and they are exquisite. And the real thing in knockabout grotesquerie are the three who call themselves, justifiably, the true and inimitable kings of laughter, the brothers Fratellini at the Cirque Medrano in Paris.
The Cirque Medrano is a one-ring circus in a permanent building near the Place Pigalle; ten times a week it fills the vast saucer of its seating capacity at an absurdly low price—the most expensive seats, I believe, are six francs—and presents something a little above the average European circus bill. There are more riding and a few more stunts than at others, and there are less trained animals. And ten times weekly the entire audience shouts with gratification as Francesco Fratellini steps gracefully over the ring, hesitates, retreats, and finally sits down in a ringside seat and begins a conversation with the lady sitting beside him.
The thing which distinguishes the Fratellini and makes them great is a sort of internal logic in everything they do. When the spangled figure with the white-washed face sits down by the ring and chats a moment it is merely disconcerting; at once the logic appears—he is waiting for the show to begin. An attendant approaches and tells him to stop stalling, that the people are waiting to be amused. He replies in an odd English that he has paid his “mawney” and why doesn’t the show begin. Promptly another attendant repeats the message of the first in English; Francesco replies in Italian. By the time the process has been gone through in five languages the clown has changed his tack entirely; you realize that since he doesn’t understand what all these uniformed attendants are saying to him, he thinks that they are the show and he is trying to conceal his own irritation at being made the object of their addresses and at the same time he is pretending to be amused at their antics. The last time he speaks in what seems to be gibberish (it is credibly reported to be rather fair Turkish) and the attendants fall back. From the opposite entrance to the ring arrives a figure of unparalleled grotesqueness—garments vast and loose in unexpected places, monstrous shoes, squares like windowpanes over his eyes, a glowing and preposterous nose. His gait is of the utmost dignity, he senses the situation and advances to Francesco’s seat; and as a pure matter of business he delivers a terrific slap, bows nobly, and departs. Francesco enters the ring. At the same time a third figure appears—a bald-headed man in carefully arranged clothes, a monocle, and a high hat, a stick. The three Fratellini are on the scene.25
It is impossible to say what happens there, for the Fratellini have an inexhaustible repertoire. The materials are always of the simplest, and the effects, too; they have hardly any “props,” the costumes, the smiles, the movements, the gestures, are almost exactly alike from day to day. Much of their material is old, for they are the sons and grandsons of clowns as far back as their family memory can carry; I have seen them once appear armed for a fight with inflated bladders, looking precisely like contemporary pictures in Maurice Sand’s book about the commedia dell’arte, and on another occasion have seen them so carried away with the frenzy of their activity that they actually improvised and proved their descent from this ancient form. They do burlesque sketches—a barber shop, a bull fight, a human elephant, a magician, or a billiard game; the moment they stop the entire audience roars for “la musique,” the most famous of their acts, remarkable because it has a minimum of physical violence.
La Musique is all a matter of construction and is a wonderful example of the use of material. For at bottom it consists of the efforts of two men to play a serenade and the continual intrusion of a third. Francesco and Paolo arrive, each carrying a guitar or a mandoline, and place two chairs close together exactly in the centre of the ring. They step on the chairs and prepare to sit on the backs, but even this simple process is difficult for them, as neither is willing to sit down before the other, nor to remain seated while the other is still erect, and they must be continually rising and apologizing until one flings the other down and keeps him there until he himself is seated. Ready then, they blow out the electric lights and strike the first notes; but the spotlight deserts them; they are left in the dark and puzzled; they regard one another with dismay and suspicion. Suddenly they see it across the ring and, descending with great gravity, carry their chairs across. Again they start, and again the spotlight goes; their irritation mounts, but their dignity remains and they follow it. It flits back to where they had come from. There is a consultation and the two chairs are returned to their original place in the centre of the ring. Then the two musicians take off their coats, prowl around the ring stalking the light, and fall upon it; then slowly and with much labour they lift the light by its edges and carefully carry it back to their chairs. And as they begin to play the grotesque marches in behind them, unconscious of them, intent only upon his vast horn and the enormous musical score he carries. Unseeing and unseen, he prepares himself, and at about the tenth bar the great bray of his horn shatters the melody of the strings. The two musicians are dismayed, but as they cannot see the source of the disturbance, they try again; again the horn intrudes. This time there is expostulation and argument with the grotesque, but, as he reasonably points out, music was desired and he is doing his share. There is only one issue for such a scene, and it takes place, in a riot.
THE FRATELLINI. By Fernand Leger
The preparation of these riots is a work of real delicacy, for the Fratellini know that two things are equally true: violence is funny and violence ceases to be funny. Like Chaplin, they infuse into their violence the sense of reason—they are violent only when no other means will suffice. In the photographer scene they call into action the “august” a stock character of the European circus, played at the Medrano with exceptional skill by M Lucien Godart. The august is a man of great dignity whose office it is to parley with clowns, be the butt of their jokes, and in M Godart’s version, set off their grotesque appearance by an excellent figure and the most correct of evening clothes. (He is in addition a rather good tumbler, and it is part of the Medrano tradition for the audience to hiss him until he grows seemingly furious and turns twenty difficult somersaults around the ring.) The Fratellini, armed with a huge black box and a cloth, ask him to sit for his photograph. Francesco takes it upon himself to explain the apparatus, Paolo standing close by with the three fence posts which represent the tripod, and Alberto, the grotesque waiting near by. Suddenly the tripod falls on Alberto’s feet and he howls with pain; Paolo picks the posts up again, and again they fall, and again he howls. It is unbelievable that this should be funny, yet it is funny beyond any capacity to describe it for one reason which the spectator senses long before he sees it. That is that the tripod is not intentionally thrown on the feet of the grotesque. The fault is Francesco’s, for he is explaining the machine and making serious errors, and every time he makes a mistake Paolo gets excited and forgets that he has the tripod in his hand, and simply lets it drop. One senses his acute regret, and at the next moment one realizes that his scientific zeal, his respect for his profession of photographer, simply does not permit him to let a misstatement pass; his gesture as he turns to set the matter right is so eager, so agonized, that one doesn’t see what has happened to the tripod until it has fallen. And to point the moral of the matter, when the grotesque Alberto after the fifth time picks the tripod up and attempts to slay Paolo, Paolo is again turning toward the others and the blow goes wide.
What the Fratellini are doing here is, to be sure, what every great actor does—they are presenting their effects indirectly. The difficulty for them is that in the end they must give their effects with the maximum of directness—they have to strike a man in the face and make the sound tell. In the scene of the photograph the august is “he who gets slapped” (the phrase is a common one) and the scene is carefully built up through his reluctance and stupidity in posing. At first it is only an exaggeration of the customary difficulties between a photographer and a little child; but as the august becomes more and more suspicious of the intentions of the photographer, the clowns become more and more insistent that he, and nobody but he, shall have his picture taken. Gradually an atmosphere of hostility is built up; the august tries to escape from the ring and is hauled back; then dragged, then forced to sit; the opposing wills grow more and more violent; the audience senses the good will of the clowns, the obstinacy of the august; not a push or shove is given without reason and meaning. And when they see that there is nothing else for it, the three hurl themselves upon the clown in a frenzy of destructiveness and he is rent limb from limb. (In actual fact only his exquisite evening clothes were rent, but the effect is the same.)
In these scenes and almost all their others, the Fratellini escape the reproach of being nothing but violent, while they hold every good element which violence in action can give them. To them are comparable the best (and only the best) of Eddie Cantor’s scenes—when he applied for the job of policeman and when he was examined for the army—where there is a play of motive and a hidden logic. In their world everything must be sensible, and the most sensible thing in the world is to hit out. Behind them is a dual tradition—centuries of laughter and centuries of refining the instruments by which simple laughter can be produced. For it is opposed to their sense of fitness (as it is to ours) that the clown should create an effect of subtlety.26 The kind of laughter they produce must involve the whole body, but not the mind. They have to be active all the time, so that you are dazzled and cannot think; and they must shake the solid ground under your feet, so that you may shake with laughter. What the critical observer discovers as method must reach the actual average spectator only as effect. All of this the Fratellini have accomplished—“these three brothers who constitute one artist” are the complete and perfect exemplars of their art. Seeing them sometimes twice a week, and nearly two dozen times, I find their qualities inexhaustible. Even in the descriptions of acts noted above it can be seen that they have a definite sense of pace; their changes from fast to slow in the middle of an act, their variations from violence to trickery, their complete mastery of climax, their fertility of invention, are all elements of superiority. But they are only elements in a composition based on something fundamentally right—the knowledge that we have almost forgotten how to laugh in the actual world, and that to make us laugh again they must create a world of their own.
